Cross Disciplinary Fellowship Programme (XDF)

The MRC is funding a flexible fellowship programme—the Cross Disciplinary Fellowship Programme (XDF)—that will support researchers to carry out projects at the intersection of different scientific fields. This matters because many of the most challenging questions in medical research—such as how the brain processes information, how tissues repair themselves, or how infections spread through populations—do not fit neatly within a single discipline. Traditional funding structures can make it difficult for researchers to combine expertise from, say, biology with physics, engineering, or computer science. The XDF scheme is designed to remove that barrier by giving fellows the freedom to work across boundaries from the start. The potential impact depends on the specific projects that emerge. Because this is a flexible training and career-development scheme rather than a single research project, there is no predetermined outcome. The value lies in building a cohort of researchers who are comfortable working across disciplines—people who might later develop new diagnostic tools, imaging techniques, or computational models that would not have arisen from a single field working in isolation. This is fundamentally a capacity-building initiative: it invests in people, not in a specific discovery.